Tuskegee: Landscape in black and white

Winterthur Portfolio

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 19-37

  Weiss, Ellen ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55549130461     PISSN: 00840416     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/496838     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. The exhibit is described in Southern Letter 1, vol. 3 (October 1884). This monthly publication was modeled on Hampton Institute's Southern Workman and was directed to northern supporters.
2. The best modern account of early Tuskegee is Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
3. See also Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, 14 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-89);
4. Richard K. Dozier, Tuskegee: Booker T. Washington's Contribution to the Education of Black Architects (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990);
5. and L. Albert Scipio, Pre-War Days at Tuskegee: Historical Essay on Tuskegee Institute, 1881-1943 (Silver Spring, Md.: Roman Publications, 1987). Washington's many books, the best known of which is Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901), interweave his social, economic, and educational purposes with his school's development.
6. Harlan, Booker T. Washington.
7. Harlan, Washington Papers, 2:246-47. Washington traveled in Denmark in 1911.
8. New York Evening Post, June 9, 1885, as reprinted in Harlan, Washington Papers, 2:278-79.
9. Dozier, Tuskegee, pp. 117, 133.
10. For the 1904 plan, see Scipio, Pre-War Days at Tuskegee, p. 66.
11. On Greenwood, see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 169-70;
12. and Dozier, Tuskegee, pp. 132-37.
13. Booker T. Washington, Working with the Hands (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1904), pp. 100-102. The Practice Cottage was built in 1895 and moved about 1915.
14. Olivia E. Phelps Stokes, sketches for a bathhouse redesign and the Lincoln Gates, March 14, 1902, reel 179, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. Dozier, Tuskegee, pp. 83-168.
15. Kenneth Severens, Southern Architecture: 350 Years of Distinctive American Building (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), p. 156.
16. All by Kenrick Ian Grandison: "From Plantation to Campus: Progress, Community, and the Lay of the Land in Shaping the Early Tuskegee Campus," Landscape Journal 15, no.1 (Spring 1996): 6-22;
17. "Landscapes of Terror: A Reading of Tuskegee's Historic Campus," in Patricia Yaeger, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 334-67;
18. "Beyond Buildings: Landscape as Cultural History in Constructing the Historical Significance of Place," in Michael A. Tomlan, ed., Preservation: Of What, for Whom? (Ithaca, N.Y.: National Council for Preservation Education, 1998);
19. and "Negotiated Space: The Black College Campus as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America," American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (September 1999): 529-79.
20. For Grandison's assertions about location, see "Beyond Buildings," pp. 162-63;
21. for his claims about separate drives, see Grandison, "Landscape of Terror," pp. 359-60;
22. for the comparison to Auburn University, see Grandison, "Landscape of Terror," p. 347. There is no available history of the town of Auburn. My memory, based on a 2-year residency, is that the historic architecture on the university side of the town is from the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting that the town may have grown out toward the existing school from a more distant older center.
23. On road naming, see, "Landscape of Terror," p. 347;
24. on the exposure of the public road, see Grandison, "Landscape of Terror," p. 359;
25. on the quadrangle, see Grandison, "Negotiated Space," p. 553.
26. Grandison, "Landscape of Terror," pp. 360-62.
27. Joseph F. Citro, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute: Black School-Community, 1900-1915 (D. Ed. diss., University of Rochester, 1972).
28. Grandison, "Landscape of Terror," p. 360.
29. Grandison, "Beyond Buildings," p. 164.
30. Ellen Weiss, "Robert R. Taylor of Tuskegee: An Early Black American Architect," Arris: Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians 2 (1991): 14.
31. See also the birds-eye campus view in Who's Who in Colored America, 1927 (New York: Who's Who in Colored America Publishing Corp., 1927), p. 283.
32. Grandison, "Beyond Buildings," p. 64.
33. The birds-eye view is in Scipio, Pre-War Days at Tuskegee, p. 55. It shows buildings that were never built that reflect Phelps-Stokes correspondence of September 1899, Washington Papers, Library of Congress. The future site of the Carnegie Library is empty; Alabama Hall is redesigned and rebuilt in the middle of what would later become the open quadrangle.
34. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, p. 161.
35. Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), chaps. 1, 2.
36. Karen Ferguson, "Caught in 'No Man's Land': The Negro Cooperative Demonstration Service and the Ideology of Booker T. Washington, 1900-1918," Agricultural History 72, no. 1 (Winter 1998).
37. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), p. 6.
38. On racial peace, see Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, p. 164.
39. On the veterans hospital conflict, see Pete Daniel, "Black Power in the 1920s: The Case of the Tuskegee Veteran's Hospital," Journal of Southern History 36, no. 3 (August 1970): 368-88;
40. Albon L. Holsey, "A Man of Courage," in William Hardin Hughes and Frederick D. Patterson, eds., Robert Russa Moton of Hampton and Tuskegee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), pp. 127-43;
41. Raymond Wolters, The New Negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions of the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 137-91;
42. and Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, pp. 27-29.
43. For the oral tradition regarding armed guards, see Wolters, New Negro, pp. 174-75.
44. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, pp. 117, 161, 286-87.
45. Harlan, Washington Papers, 8:418-20.
46. Harlan, Washington Papers, 2:140;
47. on the tree planting, see Southern Letter 5, no. 1 (May 1888).
48. Dozier, Tuskegee, p. 116.
49. On Curry, see John E. Fisher, The John F. Slater Fund: A Nineteenth-Century Affirmative Action for Negro Education (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 116-19.
50. See also Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, pp. 116, 290. There is a long-standing debate over Curry's racist pronouncements, both to their extent and intent - whether they were voiced for pragmatic purposes only.
51. On Olmsted, see Kenneth Severens, Southern Architecture (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), p. 155;
52. and Harlan, Washington Papers, 3:469-70.
53. Curry quoted in Harlan, Washington Papers 3:-475.
54. Weiss, "Robert R. Taylor of Tuskegee," pp. 3-19;
55. Dozier, Tuskegee, p. 117.
56. On David Williston, see Dozier, Tuskegee, p. 138;
57. Kirk Muckle and Dreck Wilson, "David Augustus Williston: Pioneering Black Professional," Landscape Architecture 72, no. 1 (January 1982): 82-85. Williston's request for employment is dated March 31, 1902; box 2, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. His presence thereafter at Tuskegee seems to be intermittent - a recent study reports that he was Superintendant of Buildings and Grounds until 1929 and that he was a consultant until 1948;
58. Cari Goetcheus, "Booker T. Washington, the Man and His Landscape," CRM: Cultural Resources Management 8 (1999): 31-33.
59. Grandison, "Beyond Buildings," p. 160;
60. "Landscapes of Terror," pp. 366-67;
61. "Negotiated Space," pp. 530-32.
62. Tuskegee Student, March 15, 1902;
63. see also Taylor to Washington, February 19, 1902, and Taylor to Emmett J. Scott, March 6, 1902, reel 207, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. For Nolen's consultation with Williston, see Tuskegee Student, March 18, 1911; the report is mentioned in Washington to Warren Logan, May 8 and 15, 1911, reel 55, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress.
64. Grandison, "From Plantation to Campus," p. 16.
65. Grandison, "Negotiated Space," p. 268;
66. on the valley as didactic meditation, see Grandison, "From Plantation to Campus," p. 16.
67. William Gregory, "A Student's Account of the School's Opening," in Anson Phelps Stokes, Tuskegee Institute: The First Fifty Years (Tuskegee: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1931), p. 66. Margaret W. Tantum to Washington, July 21, 1905, reel 568, Washington Papers, Library of Congress.
68. Grandison, "Landscapes of Terror," p. 362;
69. Grandison, "From Plantation to Campus," p. 16.
70. The photograph was originally published in Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe, Booker T. Washington: Builder of a Civilization (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1916), p. 191.
71. The buildings confirm the 1910-12 date. The Franz map is reproduced in Scipio, Pre-War Days at Tuskegee, pp. 76-77.
72. Gerald Kurland, Seth Low: The Reformer in an Urban and Industrial Age (New York: Twayne, 1971), p. 324.
73. Booker T. Washington, Character Building (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), pp. 40-41.
74. Abigail Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 144-48.
75. Catherine W. Bishir, "Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past, 1885-1915," Southern Culture, Inaugural Issue (1993): 5-45.
76. Headen is quoted in Maxine D. Jones and Joe M. Richardson, Talladega College: The First Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), pp. 13-14.
77. Stanton Becker Von Grabill (pseud. Rupert Fehnstroke), Letters from Tuskegee; Being the Confessions of a Yankee (Birmingham, Ala.: By the author, 1905).
78. Rockefeller Jr. to Washington, April 27, 1901, reel 68, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. Harlan, Wizard of Tuskegee, p. 288;
79. see also Harry H. Johnston, The Negro in the New World (London: Metheun, 1910), p. 408.
80. Harlan, Washington Papers, 3:424-25.
81. Washington to Warren Logan, April 9, 1897, in Harlan, Washington Papers, 4:270.
82. Julia Ward Howe, "Atlanta University & Tuskegee, Largely Reminiscent," November 1893, container 2, Julia Ward Howe Papers, Library of Congress.